Yet another brilliant XKCD comic - and this time for the geography/neogeography folk - and true to some extent
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Saturday, August 13, 2011
The SDI Cookbook from GSDI is a valuable resource for folk planning to implement or research into Spatial Data Infrastructures. Written in cookbook style, this multi-authored book contains a good bit of information on the importance of Catalog Servers in the whole scheme of things.
A Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is a framework of spatial data, metadata, users and tools that are interactively connected in order to use spatial data in an efficient and flexible way. It dictates everything that is involved in setting up a central framework for spatial data. In other, more complicated words, it is the technology, policies, standards, human resources, and related activities necessary to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain, and preserve spatial data.
SDIs are fast becoming a necessity for national agencies, data clearinghouses, governments etc. to setup a mechanism whereby spatial data can be readily shared, obtained, discovered and analyzed. In this day and age where spatial data is becoming ubiquitous in nature, SDIs provide a viable mechanism to attempt to bring all the stakeholders to the table.
Geospatial Catalogs are specialized catalog servers that store metadata on spatial data - i.e, they describe the data stored in maps and what not, in a central location. As with any metadata storage, this allows the meta-data to be searched and queried in various forms, thus providing users with an easy and efficient way of identifying the required source data.
The Open Geospatial Consortium has provided specifications for Metadata Catalog Servers, which have been implemented by various Catalog Systems such as Geonetwork, Excat, Deegree etc.